Dinosaur Cowboys – Tabletop Skirmish Game

I’ve kind of stalled out on Nanowrimo after a disastrous week 3, for which I fully blame my business trip. I haven’t hit my stride since coming back, but maybe I will before the month is out.
The good news is I’ve made lots of great progress on The Saloon, my posse building web application. Currently the remaining TODO items look like this:

Major Saloon TODOs

• Strip PDF filename of special characters (for example comma doesn’t work well)
• Need to denote Allegiance and Breed somehow in PDF
• Need to have transparent HP values (maybe write text instead of using a field?)
• Split status bar into a different div so just it can be updated via ajax
• Add URL generation so an entire Posse can be passed via external link

Minor Saloon TODOs

• Regenerate serialVersionUIDs once classes are completed
• Add titles to the various elements on the page, like Weapons and Armor, etc.
• Clean up via internationalization / override the error messages

So basically the main areas left are three touchups to PDF export. Otherwise the PDFs come out looking AWESOME! I have the leader, all members, and the dinosaur exporting properly. To give you an idea of how these PDFs look feel free to download Hope’s Warden posse as PDF. You might remember them from an earlier post. But yeah it’s pretty neat being able to translate a paper copy into a PDF with very little effort (it took about 5 minutes to enter the data through The Saloon).

Lots of improvements and bug fixes are now in the app, so it’s worth checking out again. I’m going to wrap up PDF export soon-ish, and then put up some info on various forums so I can get some feedback and views on the application.

Anyways to give you an idea of some of the recent changes here is a log of my SVN commits:

- Added PDF output for Dinosaurs, including their own unique stat images and additional fields
- Added missing extra column for dino that was created for humans for their refresh button
- Added a method for regenerating a new random name upon user request
- Read the first and last name data from a ZIP file instead, which saved a few KB in terms of the WAR size
- Added random name generation for Leaders and Members. The name data is pulled from the US Census data.
- Added a method for restarting the session. Some minor work around the PDF so that we don't allow a save until the posse is valid, and warn the user of what's missing otherwise.
- Some minor tweaks to the layout of the ODT file. It might need to be ported back to the rulesets/cowboys/ folder after each change?
- A bunch of work around the Save to PDF functionality. Now Leader and all Members export properly. Still need dinosaur and Allegiance and a few other tweaks.
- Fixed some bugs, mainly around the opening/closing/toggling of Traits and the Store. There were a lot of ugly flags being flipped around in there.
- Progress on f:ajax optimizations. Big savings once I realized I can do :f:pl (for example) to render the entity list from a composite component. Now the app won't sent upwards of 120kb just to do something basic like increase MV while the Store is opened. Still some bugs around opening/closing of the store and traits in any non-standard use case
- Changed wording from status to statusbar
- Removed Rope Lasso since it's included for free
- Added a bunch of status messages to the various elements of the app, which will display in the status bar along the top. Also made an option to hide the status bar and revert to the previous behaviour of putting messages in the first table's footer
- Added introductory text to explain DC. This will only display on their first visit, after that a cookie is created and if that cookie is present the intro text won't be displayed. Also made a rad status bar overlay along the top (colors undecided) for displaying error messages and info and general stats of the posse. This helps when scrolling down into the store lists.
- Added sorting to every table, plus some cool cascading sorts so that clicking Name will apply to all subtables, for example. Styled the sort headers as well.

If I had to sum up the big changes I’d say: tables are now sortable, new intro text for the app, terrific looking status bar that floats as you scroll, lots of optimizations with JSF’s f:ajax to reduce bandwidth per click, new random name generation for leaders and members, and obviously PDF export for everyone.

As before feel free to check out the app at http://saloon.thruhere.net/.